Multimedia With Learner Autonomy Model In Teaching English Listening

Listening comprehension has been a focus of teaching foreign language for many years in China. However, there are many problems in the practical listening class. For example, in many universities and colleges the listening course takes up only a small portion of time in the curriculum, only two teaching periods each week in the first two years. The listening input is rather inadequate. We lack adequate media in present listening class. The students listening ability is rather weak. The first part of this paper analyzes the reasons for this problems. The main reason is that during the traditional listening class, teachers still dominates the class, students can't set their own pace according to their own needs. Therefore, enhancing listening comprehension should be one major target in listening teaching. The second part of the paper deals with the literature revies of research on the effectiveness of multimedia for listening teaching and points out the absence of concern. Although there are studies of the use of multimedia for developing listening comprehension, to date there do not seem to be studies focusing on learner autonomy. More specifically, no investigation has been done on the model of learner autonomy under multimedia instruction. Then the author proposes a model of learner autonomy under multimedia instruction for listening teaching. The third and fourth part of the paper deals with the theory foundation of multimedia CALL and autonomy, and sets against a background of research into the history of CALL, the advantages of MCALL, the roles and characteristics of MCALL in relation to listening. Then the author takes the MultimediaCollege English Listening as an example to illustrate how students learn listening comprehension with the model of learner autonomy under multimedia instruction. Finally, a relevant experiment is designed in order to find out whether the multimedia with learner autonomy in teaching English listening comprehension is more effective thean the conventional teacher-dominated listening teaching. And a survey is carried out to show students attitudes and opinions about the moder oflearner autonomy under multimedia instruction. The investigation has yielded the conclusion that this model plays a positive and statistically significant role in enhancing students listening comprehension ability. The results of the survey showed strongly support for the popularity of this model.